Courrier: An AI Reader for French Letters
An open source tool I designed and built for people in France who do not read French well. It explains an administrative letter in plain English, shows the line behind every answer, and suggests next steps that the person approves.
Built for the person who cannot check the French
The user of Courrier lives in France and does not read French well. A letter arrives from the town hall, the tax office or the job centre, and they need to know who wrote, what is wanted, by when, and what happens if they do nothing.
A general chatbot can explain the letter, and it can explain it well. The trouble is that this person has no way to check the explanation, and they have to know what to ask. Courrier always answers the same questions, and every answer comes with the exact words of the letter it was based on, highlighted on the page.
The model finds, the code checks, and the person decides.
The model returns each answer together with a quote copied from the letter. Courrier then looks for that quote in the letter and pins it with a number. When the quote is not there, the answer is marked in amber and the person is asked to check it.
What happens after the reading
Dates are worked out in code
A small model is good at finding a sentence and unreliable at counting days. So the model only points to the date or the number of days, and Courrier does the maths and says it did.
A date only counts as a deadline when the words around it present it as one. Courrier also compares the weekday written in the letter with the date itself. The sample letter says Thursday 16 October, and that date is a Friday, so Courrier suggests asking which day is right.
Next steps wait for a yes
Courrier suggests a reminder before the deadline, a checklist of the documents asked for, and a reply in French with an English version under it. Each one can be approved, edited or skipped, and everything done can be undone from a short log.
Courrier never sends anything. The reply opens in the person’s own email app, and it warns them when the email says documents are attached that the checklist does not show as ready.
On your own computer, or in the browser
The open source version runs on Gemma 4, a 12 billion parameter model, on your own computer through Ollama. It costs nothing to run, and the letter never leaves the machine.
The live demo runs on Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite in the EU, and it does not keep the letters people add. The two sample letters play back recorded readings, so they load at once and cost nothing.